Sunday, 30 December 2012

Titles,Headings&Subheadings,

As a group when we are editing our film opening we must make sure that we include these following titles,headings and subheadings;
  • Music by
  • Sound,picture and institution
  • Institution presents( ours will be Paramount )
  • Production company related to the institution
  • Transitions- for example fading to blsack/white or zooming
  • Names of the cast
  • Production designer(s)
  • Costume designer(s)
  • Story by
  • Editor(s)
  • Produced by
  • Title of the film
  • Directed by
 These titles ranged from film to film that we researched. We didnt just look at our own genre, we had a look at simiar genres and opposite genres. The point of researching the title order in other genres was so that we can compare with what will be the best position for them all. So we took into consideration about what order that we should do the titles in.
    We decided not to put the word 'Starring' for the cast names. This is because it doesnt look very profecional, but it was also used in the more dated films, so they are not very comonly seen in modern films.The word starring might also distract and confuse the audience from whats happening in the film. This word unfortunetly does not fit our genre as we dissgussed as a group. The rest of our group had a disgussion about this word and how it may change peoples perspectives of our film.

Shooting Summary.

Today we will take the cameras out to shoot some shots for our film.So far we have done most of the shots that we need to do outside. But as we was editing we found that we needed to redo a few bits because we had some mistakes or things being in the wrong places. So we decided while the weather was okay for this scene we decided that it was perfect for us to grab the cameras and re-shoot the scenes that we missed out and to perfect them but not take too long. Due to the fact that the weather was turning and that we still had to edit all of this footage and put it in with the other filming.

   Jessica had found a great place for us to do our outisde filming which fits into our story board perfectly.We decided to take 2 cameras as this will enable us to get two different angles for us to alternate on- so in the film we have a view of her walking away from the camera as well as h
er walking towards the camera. Rebecca will have one of the cameras and she will be incharge of close ups and distance shots of the characters.Ashleigh will use the other camera to back up Rebecca with the close ups and Ashley will also be in charge of  establishing shots. These establishing shots will be used in the opening of the film( for when the people who are in the film names will appear ).

   Jessica will be the one that we will concentrate on the most as we will be taking close ups of her face- This is becuase he facial expressions are the most important thing in a phsyocolical thriller! Her costume will be simple as she plays the part of a teenager who 'suspects' that she is being followed.Her clothes will be simple because she suspects that she is being followed so she will be very self oncious and feel very un-safe and vulnerable. So she wont exactly be walking arround in a mini skirt and bikini top.Also becuase its winter. So with her feeling vulnerbale and un-safe this film makes her look over paranoid because she is alone.... ( the one in the middle is Jessica).


 The other character is being played by Me ( Laura Wynne). This character is the stalker that is stalking the teenager( Jessica Seaney ).The stalker will be wearing all of the some colour ( black). Black was chosen becuase its very much a morbid colour that gives mystery as it symbolises suspicion. As I have never seeen a stalker wear a green jacket with pink shoes and orange trousers.We decided to disguise the gender of the stalker so black is a unisex colour as well as it symbolizing danger.So the outfit will be pretty much a black hoodie and black leggins or jeans( but you cannot really see from the hips down on the stalker). They will not be shooting the stalkers face as this will keep the viewers imagination growing with suspenion. We did origonally decide to do the face paint but then we realised how over the top it was becuase of the scenes that we had chosen.It would of looked out of place in the conventions of our psycological thriller.

 With the weather being unpredictable we will have trouble trying to fit our filming in so we will try and do it as fast and as profecional as possible.This is becuase it will be getting cold and we dont want it to ruin the filming with the camera women shaking the camera or anything. So we will and try do it as soon as possible!


'This is the route that we took when we was going to go film our bit in the woods'.












Editing part 2

Today we will edit our film and add in the clips that we need and remove the clips that we don't want. I will  be in charge of this little bit. I will do this by selecting the clip that we want and dragging the yellow line to the bit that we want to delete, so that the bit that we want to delete is in the yellow box. We will then either split the clip and delete it or delete it without splitting the clip. The clips that we may decide to split would be the ones that are of the girl blinking - This will enable us to put a flashback in as soon as she closes her eyes.


 Today I also managed to do some transitions between the scenes. This is so what it doesnt just cut from one scene to another. For the flash backs from her eyes closing I used a transition where it zooms into her eyes.This is cross zoom. This is the right transition as it looks like the viewers will be going into her eye.

Friday, 28 December 2012

Target audience feed back

We as a group managed to upload our video's on top some social networking sites such as; Twitter, Facebook and You tube as well as broadcasting the URL on BBM( blackberry messenger )- this is so we can get views and opinions about what we should change about our video, what went well and what they didn't like about the video.
   The reviews that we got back from my Facebook page about our film was;



So as a whole it looks like we really hit it off , but we also had some verbal feedback form our target audience saying that ' the phone ringing bit was far too long and they just ended the film there because they got really bored of watching the phone just ring. So in addition to these comments we managed to change parts of the film opening that people found a bit boring.
    The bits that we changed from this film http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwLWZoGOJUo to this film http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aeLpo4XhxU was;
  • We split up the phone ringing clip with other clips of the girl looking at her phone and trying to call some one.
  • We split up the establishing shot at the beginning and added in more titles.
  • We also removed some of the clips added in some transitions and changed the contrast and speed on some of the clips.


Thursday, 27 December 2012

Transfering our film from final cut express to imovie

Today we was in the middle of editing our film opening when somebody mentioned how hard it was for people to do their editing on imovie and how easy it was on final cut express. So as a group we decided to have a discussion about what to do. We discussed the positives and negatives of converting. We did this so we knew what could happen and what people thought about it. If we all thought that it was a good idea then we would go ahead or at least the majority  But if not then we will stick to final cut express.

  While our group was writing down the pro's and cons of converting one of the major thing that we had to take in to consideration was timing. This was a major factor as we was on a time schedule and it was a dead line that cannot be missed. Another thing that concerned us as a group was what if we did convert it and we was unable to work in imovie and for it to be at the standards that we want it to be. What if it doesn't convert over the way it should, what if we cannot get it back in the same way? what if it delete's it's self while we are trying to convert it?  These were all major questions that had our group in worry. But the only way to find out was to try this.

 So in order for us to do this we decided to back up our edited part on to another computer and 2 memory sticks- this was just in case it got deleted on anything so we could still have our hard work that we had done.

  The conversion from final cut express to imovie was a dramatic step and development in our skills. As in imovie we was able to edit things a lot faster and easier. We had a wider range of transitions and ways in which we can make the film better. For instance in the film we had some flashbacks like a dream of a girl running through the woods. In order for this to all look the same we had to adjust the contrast  composition, and the colors  We also changed the effect to a more dreamy-fied effect. Without converting this into imovie we would not of had the opportunity to do this with the professional look.

Wednesday, 19 December 2012

Animatic planning.

This is where we planned what was going to happen in our story board.

  1. The Paramount Pictures presents bit comes up along with other companies.
  2. The UNHINGED title comes up with a black back ground. We have decided to change this to have the unhinged but at the end of the filming opening as then it would make it more dramatic.
  3. A shot of the girl washing her hands while zooming into her hands & the directors and producers come up.
  4. a close up of her wiping her eyes and then we will have flash backs of her running in the forrest.
  5. Flashback of her running away from something in the forrest.
  6. Her blinking with another flashback.
  7. Flashback while she wipes her face( covering eyes ).
  8. Walks out of the room and screams, as a black screen appears the title UNHINGED will come up now.

Friday, 14 December 2012

Music for the opening.

    We have been told that we cannot use pre done songs. What I mean by this is that we cannot have songs that are already done so for example the song ' the darkness- I believe in a thing called love'. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZtcz4WVBGg  .We cannot do this because this would be copyright. So what we will need to do is create a song that is made from scratch, even though we would be aloud to clip bits of the musical( instrumental) bit.


   After discovering this we discussed as a group that maybe the beginning of ' little mix -DNA '.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzIniiLdurg  We thought that this would be a great opening for our opening because it has a music jewellery box sound to it which we thought would be perfect for our opening. But consequently we changed how the beginning was going to start so we decided that our music co-cordinator and editor jessica would help us create a short music piece that will last approx. 2 mins ( because that is how long our opening is to be). So sooner or later we will have developed a short piece of music.


Wednesday, 12 December 2012

Title ideas.

   We got our creative thinking going on by creating a title for our film. We was looking for something that will intrigue the viewer and that will link to the film. Because there is nothing worse than a title that doesn't match a film. For example a horror film being called ' Sugar plum fairy ' or something that doesn't suit our genre. The relevance for this is so that the title will not be misleading so it will be linked to the film one way or another. We thought about the vocabulary that we should use due to our target audience as we cannot use baby-like language for our psychological horror so we have to pick the right terminology for our target audience. But then again nothing too complicated or something that people cannot understand. Usually these types of key things are forgotten but we took them in to  consideration. The title will be more-or-less the first thing that the viewer will see on the screen so we want the viewer to be interested and not put off or confused by it.

  We all decided that we will all come up with one title each ( so that we all contributed to this). We decided on these titles;

  1. Unhinged.
  2. Forget me not.
  3. Forgotten.
  4. I do believe.
    We discussed all of these titles and decided that the title ' I do believe ' seems more like a chick-flick rather than a psychological thriller,  so this one did not suit our genre.So we eliminated that one from the list. Also we removed 'Forget me not' as this seems more like a children's film or a rom-com ( romantic comedy). This ones doesn't really give the reader a draw in feel. Below are some audience feed back on what the thought about these two titles;
" 'I do believe' sounds a bit like a line from peter pan."
" 'Forget me not' sounds a lot like a ' Fifi and the flower tots' kind of movie."

 So we as now left with the following two titles;

  1. Unhinged.
  2. Forgotten.
   These two are excellent for our title as it suits the genre well. This is because of the terminology is easy to read and to understand. These will attract our target audience as it related to the film and our idea of our opening. We wanted the title to be easy, fast and catchy. We was considering a one or two word title. This is because it will be easier to remember and more intriguing for the viewers.The one word title will be very eye catching and this suits the aims of a title. In order for our final decision to be made we needed our target audience to give us feed back on what they thought about the titles and what one they liked best! The place that we done this was in our school  we asked a total of 40 students ( age range 16-18 ). This included 10 boys and 30 girls. The girls were more easier to talk to and that would answer straight, unfortunately we was unable to get an equal amount if boys aswell. This altered our results as boys and girls both have different opinions as we are all different and some are more mature and some are more immature.
 The results were;

  • Unhinged-25
  • Forgotten-15

Unhinged was the most popular title, the feedback that we got back was saying how great it was that it would suit our genre. Some of the feedback was positive and some negative...
   Some of the feedback was;
  
" 'Unhinged' seems to just draw me in it sounds so interesting!''

" 'Unhinged' has got to be my favourite."

" 'Forgotten' seems like something that other ordinary people would use. 'Unhinged' is much more unique and fresh!''

Friday, 7 December 2012

Story board planning & Story board

          Today we started to plan out our story board. I done some drawings and some quick sketches to help us improvise on the sets. As we have to do an animated story board we was really excited to be doign something that we all seen to like! Today we also couldnt find our preliminary task on the hard drive. It wasn't uploaded to any of our blogs so we had a bit of trouble there. We will try to resolve this by finding it again and trying to save it to a memory stick and to try and upload it sometime.



We have recently started filming and we have decided that we need to add in some more drawings in to our storyboard. This is because we needed adjust the scenes because of the fact that the weather is turning and we will be unable to do some of the scenes. We also decided to add in some scenes as we found that the ones that we done was too short for our opening. We added in the scenes of our victim walking through the woods and the stalker looking at her walking.

Editing.

Today we have decided to just get together and split up into mini groups and try and do some editing and some script writing. For the editing section we will be trying to cut and remake the first minute of our film. We will also try and figure out why our videos wont upload and try to resolve this.  We will also be finding all of our other videos and uploading them onto our blog.
  We will be joining forces and trying to get most of the editing done today and so that we can see what we need to redo and what things we need to adjust. For example we realised that in one of our scenes of a girl running through the woods we had bags in the back ground, unreal litter as well as the running scene- this was not right as we had to run with her form behind so the camera was all wishy washy and we cannot use this for our real filming as this would not be professional.
    We will also be doing our script again as we lost our other one-- for the voice over.

Wednesday, 5 December 2012

Voice over construction.

Today we managed to record a voice over of our head of year and one of the members of our group. We decided to have a voice over so that it will give more of an interesting turn to the film. The reason why we used our head of year was because he had a very manly voice which would be perfect for detective hale- the person who will be interviewing the best friend who's friend just '''' committed suicide '''' . By doing this we was able to do a lot of things such as getting a voice over of two very good actors as well as an actual filming of all of this so that we can decide on what we want to do with it later on.
  The reason why we decided to have a man doing the voice over of the detective was because a manly voice adds suspicion to the film. If we would of had a female doing the voice over then it wouldn't seem as tense. The reason why we decided to have a voice over in the first place was because it was our first idea and we really liked it so we decided to amalgamate it with our other idea and then we came up with our final idea.
 Our first idea was to have an interview with a detective and the best friend having a conversation about the victim - this interview was going to be all about the victim and how she seemed in the past few weeks.
For this we made a script and this was also improvised by our very own actors, so we had a basis and they expanded on it and We as a group are very proud of the actors.